film news

Happy collaborations announced! via Paste Magazine

David Lynch is collaborating not only with Werner Herzog in the near future, but also with the lost man of the avant-garde Alejandro Jodorowsky! *paramore*
I look forward to the likely metaphysical-suurealism that will result.



Also ACMI has announced the transformation of their lending library in 2009 with the elimination of paid membership and borrowing.

Instead, the service will be replaced with "a new resource centre at our Federation Square location, that will provide free genreal-public drop-in access to a wealth of Australian and International screen culture works."

I really hope that this enables greater access to the 16 and 35mm materials in the collection, because these really are the items that were difficult to access elsewhere. I really like any endeavors that will shift the resource from being something like an inner city video library into an actual resource. I am interested to see if and how they adapt library style viewing spaces into the Federation Square site.

The centre is also developing a free "major permanent exhibition that will chart the history and future of the moving image across all its forms - film, television, videogames and new media." Which hopefully will also reflect some of the more nostalgic technologies of pre-cinema from their earlier 'eyes, lies and illusions' exhibit.

MIFF 2008 - review

As the festival comes to a close I have come to the conclusion that what I find most exciting about the entire thing isn’t the films on offer but the sheer joy of seeing so many people getting excited about cinema. The lines that often spread across two city blocks were just amazing and you always found someone to talk to in them – their chatter preempting the films and taking the festival’s ‘everyone’s a critic’ advertising campaign to heart.

The only blights, for me, were the sheer number of screenings that I attended in the poorly managed and uncomfortable Greater Union cinemas. I was nostalgically reminded that this was the first cinema in which I had ever seen a film. It was Disney’s The Fox and the Hound in cinema 6. At the time, the impression that it left on me was a love of the sheer enormity of the image, an obsession with overwhelming and kinetic immersion which stays with me until this day. In the years between, many many years, we have all been treated to better seating than is still on offer there, and while I don’t expect lounge worthy chairs, it meant that if the film was a little dull my attention inevitably shifted to the most relieving forms of fidgeting. Sorry neighbors! Also, their policy of lining people up and getting them to exit via the fire escapes, meant that the festival bar ended up being a totally redundant feature that deprived me of many a possible chardonnay.

MIFF 2008 (The Night James Brown Saved Boston)

THE NIGHT JAMES BROWN SAVED BOSTON, David Leaf, 2008

This film made me remember how much I like documentaries, but also remember how often and easily they lose their mark.

The film centers around the incidents of rioting and dissent that occurred across the nation after the assignation of Martin Luther King in 1968. With a James Brown concert scheduled the following evening in a white populated area of Boston, the film explores the machinations around the event that transformed a possible crisis into a unifying experience for the citizens of Boston. Fearing that the city would be threatened by the influx of thousands of black citizens into the city, given the riots already occurring across the nation, Boston’s mayor decides to broadcast the concert on television – an unprecedented concept that eliminates traffic not only in the district but across the entire city. While James Brown was seen to be largely marginalized in this scheme, placated by a paycheck from the mayor (which it turns out was never paid), his performance nonetheless became a chronicle of a performer at the height of his career as well as a performance rendered in tribute to the late Dr. King. Through deploying concert footage and more general archival footage of the time the film attempts to depict the centrality of James Brown as an American cultural figure in the 1960’s, as a man mediating between the races as one of the first black performers to be accepted on their own terms as both a performer and an equally vocal political advocate.

Much of the film was taken up by talking-head segments of contemporary African American political leaders and the now aged concert attendees, which were often obnoxious, and would have been better if heavily edited. Further, while I am a huge fan of archival images and the historical placement of a documentary feature in a wider milieu, the net in this film seemed cast a little wide, the associations made flipped from self evident or over-emphasized to the tenuously linked. The star attraction of the film - James Brown and the telecast of the remarkable live concert – suffered from too little screen time and would have made an interesting feature release in and of itself. An amazing documentary, I believe, is always distinguished by intuitive editing. Something tells me this feature should have left at least 30 minutes in the recycle bin.

I feel good...

MIFF 2008 (Otto; Or Up with Dead People)

OTTO; OR UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE, Bruce La Bruce, 2008

I think that La Bruce’s feature The Raspberry Reich represents a certain apotheosis in contemporary avant-garde filmmaking because it merges the faultlessly playful and the fiercely intelligent. In bringing critical theory closer to queer and towards pleasure, it makes for a polemical film text that it actually fun to watch. Reich queered both sexuality and socialism into a crazy radical anarchist orgy. While many of the techniques and themes that made Reich so interesting, including the orgiastic, are carried over into Otto, the film seemed far less vital.

The plot revolves around a plague of homosexual zombies that descend on humankind, the ‘purple peril’, and their sympathetic documentary chronicler/ narrator Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus). Seems simple enough, until it is intercut with the ambling progress of the lead Otto (Jey Krisfar), a self styled zombie hero.

The film presents a multiplicity of voices and narratives, an excess of material and approaches that at times seems rich and at times seems confusing. It is an approach that works to great effect in Reich but left me flat in Otto, I was particularly off put by the loss of the possible subversive power of the zombie plague by relegating Otto’s zombie like state to an outcome of personal psychosis.

That said, Otto was visually evolved, presenting shots and scenes that were styled in a more artistic manner, which made the text often quite beautiful to watch. I particularly liked the rambling shots of Otto in the open spaces of the road and the forest, the prerequisite meaty carnage was completely disarming and the reappearance of Susanne Sachsse (the anarchist leader Gudrun from Reich) as silent screen necro-lesbian lover Hella Bent was particularly inspired.

MIFF 2008 (881)

881, Royston Tan, 2007

I can usually tell how much I am enjoying a film by how quickly it makes me cry. 881, Royston Tan’s campy epic about the Singaporean tradition of Getai singing, has my mascara streaked before the end of the opening credits and my cheeks moist throughout its entirety. The tone that Tan evokes is so genuine and endearing that it is hard to imagine even the hardest heart disliking this film, no matter how absurd it’s content.

881(pronounced in Chiense as ‘papaya’) chronicles the adopted sisterhood of the very fetching Big Papaya (Yan Yan Yeo) and Little Papaya (Mindee Ong) who follow their dreams of performing on the cutthroat Getai circuit. Steeped in a strange fusion of spirituality and fantasy, the Getai is a song and dance performance undertaken in the seventh month of the calendar to honor the spirits of the departed. Somehow in Singapore, this offering comes to take the form of performances over-embellished with lurid sequined costumes and sentimental Hokkien lyrics.

They are aided along their way to success by the irrepressible Auntie Ling’s (Ling Ling Liu) talents as a seamstress, Auntie’s estranged sister the ‘goddess of Getai’ (again Ling Ling Liu) who endows the sisters with magical voices, and Auntie Ling’s deaf-mute son who is described as a sex fiend who spends most of the film comically petting his pet ‘cock’. These performances are spot on, performed with great humor and pathos.

The Getai Godess!

As with all great tragedies, the plot oscillates between the key themes of love, death and (ultimately) transcendence. When the introductory narration tells us that Big Papaya will be dead before 25 of cancer, we know that the visual extravagance of the film (which could so easily be lost to surface) becomes the double for the irrepressible essence of the sisters celebrated through the joy of colour and song.

MIFF 2008 (Sukiyaki Western Django)

SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO, Takashi Miike, 2007

The opening of this film begins with a tableau vivant, making great use of a painted backdrop and saturated colour lighting, of a cameo’ed Quentin Tarantino as the narrator of a highly stylized gunfight. The largely incomprehensible dialogue of this scene continues into the space of the rest of the film alongside its dry humour.

The beginning of Sukiyaki creates a backdrop that is uncannily similar to that seen in Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries (1989) or her quintessential photographic series Something More (1989). The unexpected association became stronger when the plot latter featured a very unlikely didgeridoo. It is an association that is not unexpected in the anything-goes quotation of this film. To the initiated, the first half of the plot was a clear elaboration of Leone’s A Fistfull of Dollars (one of my favourites) merged into the Japanese traditions of samurai and street gangster films and every genre film in between.

Thoroughly within the tendencies of post modern film, the whole text was a collision of the eccentric: the dialogue was a tangle of colloquial western phrases in stunted accents, the characters unique and overt, the costuming anachronistic enough to be couture, the blood dramatic (as Mr. Miike will tend to do). A joyous mess held together by genre codes and slapstick humour.

Colour was used to great effect; the rival gangs hunting gold in a small mountain town were differentiated by red and white costumes of unexpected textures and tones. These bodies were set against the sepia background of the town which merged the architecture of the western pioneer town with that of the oriental temple. For such a visually interesting film, the piece suffered a little from poor film stock, which rather than evoking a classic western feel, just felt a cheap and under focused.

One aspect of the film that really interested me was excess of symbols that were alchemical. While I think that most were unintentional, it would certainly make for an interesting analysis.

MIFF 2008 (Let the right one in)

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, Låt den rätte komma in, Tomas Alfredson, 2008

While this feature had many cute moments, mainly found in the innocent pathos between a young boy Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and his vampire protector the ageless and androgynous Eli (Lina Leandersson), it was a watchable but flawed endeavor.

Aesthetically the film didn’t click for me. The editing was inhibited - poorly timed cutting making the visual style of the film feel a little impotent. The potentially claustrophobic interiors were underplayed and the use of the snowy Swedish exteriors again felt dispossessed except as a double for the largely depressed cast.

The camera was a little grainy and the scenes largely realist in set up, which are fine in theory, except that a vampire-horror genre piece or a film with a child protagonist are generally given over to more fantastic visions. In trying to forge some point between the two, realism and the fantastic, nothing felt fully realized. Some of the most interesting scenes focused on the bodies of the child characters and the lengthened shot time in these sequences could have been extended to give a more contemplative tone to the entire film, or to give the entire scenario over to a sense of the uncanny.

What maintained the film was the story itself, adapted from the (apparently) exquisite book by John Adjvide Lindvquist (who also wrote the screenplay). It allowed the trajectory of the film to take a slow dive from bleak everyday life towards the colour of carnal horror without ever feeling like something other than a child’s film (which is quite an achievement in tone really). Alongside this redeeming consistency, the final scene is a rewarding watch. Including a swimming pool and a bully’s revenge it was joyously gratuitous – a dismembering worthy of both smiles and applause.

MIFF 2008 (Etoile Violette, MODS)

ÉTOLIE VIOLETTE, Axelle Ropert, 2005

MODS, Serge Bozon, 2002

It was a pity to see that the skinny legged, black coated hipsters who flocked to this screening seemed so disappointed by it – they shuffled out of the cinema and said as much as they teetered down Collins street – because these films were both ingenious and beautiful. They certainly lived up to the MIFF descriptions as “almost impossible to categorize”.

The double screening began with Étoile Violette, a visual exploration of solitude. A group of adults taking a nightclass on literature, entitled ‘The solitude of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, find that the themes of the class, as well as their lives, is solitude. It is an isolation often expressed through bodily gestures, especially in the disjointed role-play performances that structure the class, which seem to depict compartmentalized psychic lives. The students stand apart, they obscure their faces, the lead Alexandre (played by writer-director Axelle Ropert) loses himself in the repetitive stitching of suits in his work as a tailor.

Similar gestures of isolation, in a more poignant manner, are founded in the musical vignettes that punctuate the text. They are set apart not only by sound, but by a tracking camera that defies the typical notion of character as centre by its mobility. Dwarfing them within unfolding spaces this camera unfurls from the centre of the protagonist towards the textures of the street, the adorned walls of a room, the infinite limbs of trees or the night sky. It was interesting insomuch as these sequences proved to be a more objective slip into reality, into the tangible world of objects (no matter that the style was artistically fantastical), than was offered by the characters. Alexandre in particular privileged a counterpoint that saw him ultimately slip into the psychic world of Rousseau - as was elaborated with a number of fantasy sequences between the two in a forest and a particularly experimental final sequence.

Largely, this film was engaging because the performances were and the interpretation of Rousseau that flows through the narrative was very amusing and reflexive.

MODS, which followed, was an ideal partner piece. An experimental play on rhythm and repetition, held together by a script that was similarly intelligent and witty, it was mainly about bodies and minds in momentum. The characters were unexpected and gave their personalities through performative gestures rather than narrative exploration. These gestures often shifted into mechanized choreographed dance sequences of both symmetry and variety, which were the most fascinating part of the film (and surely a nod to the New Wave, especially Bande a part). The impression was often ritualistic and presented a film text that would be readily available for Structuralist interpretation.

While there was a plot, it developed by continual visual repetition and pattern. It was unified in the final sequences in a charmingly simplistic manner, (again) a script by Ropert enfolding it into a temporal play of Chinese-whispers over a misunderstanding between a boy and a girl. What dialogue there was lyrical, again relying on repetition and the pattern of sounds, but it was rendered with the same thoughtfulness that made Étoile Violette so interesting.

While I found both of these films to be incredibly interesting (and unpretentious) jaunts, redeemed all the more by solid scripts, they will not be many peoples cup of tea. As always, for some, experimental is a warning word for wank, so if more classical story telling is in order look elsewhere. It would be interesting to see what comes next for Bozon, Ropert and their acting team as there was a great continuity between these pieces, especially to observe whether this focus on gesture remains a key storytelling device.

The images on this post were drawn from ALLOCINE, which is an excellent resource for French and European cinema, similar to the irrepresable IMDB.